This Week In Fiction: Tony Earley

Your story in this week’s issue, “Jack and the Mad Dog,” imagines a future for the fairy-tale character Jack, of the beanstalk. What drew you to Jack and his story?

“Jack and the Mad Dog” started with a true family story: Years ago, on a bridge in the middle of the night, a dog bit my grandfather’s brother Marion. Uncle Marion grabbed the dog by the head and threw it into the creek. Then he ran through a cornfield to my grandfather’s house. Everyone assumed that the dog was rabid and that Uncle Marion was going to die. But my grandfather and Marion travelled farther back into the mountains, where a woman applied a folk remedy to the bite—the nature of which I will keep secret at this time—and Uncle Marion didn’t contract rabies. So that part of the story was a gift. I tried for years to tell the story straight, but it never got going. (Protagonist bitten by rabid dog. So what?) Then one day, for reasons I don’t pretend to understand, Jack of the folk tales showed up in my head and essentially said, “Hey, writer, you need to step aside and let me handle this.” Then the dog began to talk.

You mentioned that your story was inspired by the Appalachian version of the story, collected by Richard Chase in the nineteen-thirties. Does that version differ much from the English folktale?

Like a lot of things English, the Jack stories were greatly improved by the Scots-Irish in the Appalachians. I’m a big fan of bluegrass, for instance, but English folk music puts me to sleep.

Does Appalachia have an especially rich relationship to fairy-tales?

What I’m about to say, of course, is a huge generalization—not everybody from the mountains can tell a tale, or even wants to—but I don’t know if we so much love fairy-tales as we love a good story. We love to tell stories, and don’t necessarily let the truth get in the way of a narrative. I come from a long line of serial embellishers. Sometimes a good story’s got a ghost in it; sometimes a panther chases my Uncle Bill and Fred Price home from a coon hunt. I stole that one, too. Only I made the panther talk. It’s hard to miss with talking animals, especially if they’re scary.

The future you imagine for Jack is a bleak one, in which he has failed to learn from or regret his mistakes, and they come back, so to speak, to bite him. Do you think that’s what he deserves?

Once I started thinking about Jack, I noticed that while he continually foils symbolic representations of ill-used power—giants, kings, witches, et al—he doesn’t necessarily occupy the moral high ground. The giant of the beanstalk, for example, doesn’t seem to be bothering anybody until Jack sneaks into his house and steals his golden goose. If the giant had succeeded in eating Jack, it seems to me, Jack would have had it coming.

And, of course, you’ve made your story a story about telling stories—about the conventions and clichés of folktales (the heroes who are constantly “setting out,” the maidens with “heaving bosoms” and “flashing eyes”) and about the devices that a writer uses (“limited omniscient narrators,” “section breaks and the exposition implied therein”) to tell them. Yet, even as you call attention to these things, you don’t undermine the tension of your own narrative. Are these techniques somehow infallible?

These days, Jack has lost almost all import in Appalachian culture. To my knowledge, his stories are told almost exclusively, and self-consciously, by storytellers—preservationists—at festivals and schools. What happens if the day comes when nobody tells his stories at all? What happens to Jack and the other characters? To them, that would probably seem like the apocalypse—the collapse not only of their world but of the narrative conventions that created it. I think that in this story, metafiction seems not only relevant but necessary. I also never imagined that I would say that.

It’s been a few years since your last story. Are you working on a novel these days? Is “Jack and the Mad Dog” part of a series of new stories?

I guess the easiest way to explain that gap is to say that I’ve been pursued by a black dog of my own. But I’m finally finishing a collection of stories called “Mr. Tall,” which will come out in 2014. Jack still has a giant and a tornado to deal with. After that, we’ll see. The black dog might be waiting at the next bridge. Or it might not. You never know.

Illustration by Martin Ansin/Photograph by Birthe Piontek

Deborah Treisman is The New Yorker’s fiction editor and the host of its Fiction Podcast.